Music

Friday, August 07, 2015

Paul Clark,
co-founder of The Muriel Awards, developed this offshoot of the annual awards group (of which
I am one of the original members) as a way of acknowledging the cream of
international cinema and giving us a shot at writing about some of these great
and enduring works. And now, with the voting completed and tabulated, Clark has
begun rolling out each of the honored films—each class in the past usually
numbered around eight, but the class of
2015 turned out to be quite a lot larger.

Clark explains: “When I took a look at this year’s
top vote-getters, I noticed that not a single one of them was in a language
other than English. Seeing as how the goal of the Muriels HOF (and the Muriels
proper, for that matter) has been to cast a wide net… I looked at the next
highest vote-getters in the bunch and noticed a number of foreign-language
films there.”

Faced
with the exclusion of many foreign-language titles, Clark decided to fold that
next highest ranked group of films into the other films already chosen,
ballooning the number of Muriel Hall of Fame inductees in 2015 to a quite unusual 17.

Which
just meant more work for him, as the editor and coordinator of the project, but
twice as much fun for faithful readers of the Muriel adventure. And now that
fun has begun. Paul began rolling out this year’s honorees, one each day, last Saturday,
and the hit parade continues. Here’s what has already been revealed of the
Muriels Hall of Fame menu, v. 2015:

Coming soon, more updates on the Muriels Hall of Fame class
of 2015, including my own MHoF piece— the movie I was assigned is all about ethics, small-town
politics, the media, gender reversal and a costume worn by one of the leads that
likely sent your own analog TV into a horizontal tizzy when you used to catch
it on the late show. Wouldn't you like to know what it is? Stay tuned!